{"id":28186,"date":"2013-11-18T06:42:27","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:42:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28186"},"modified":"2013-11-25T01:13:07","modified_gmt":"2013-11-25T08:13:07","slug":"my-personal-private-kennedy-assassination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/?p=28186","title":{"rendered":"My Personal, Private Kennedy Assassination"},"content":{"rendered":"

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago , the world reacted with horror, shock, sadness, and grief. I also reacted with horror, shock, sadness, and grief, but there was something more than that going on in my mind. I took Kennedy\u2019s assassination personally. I don\u2019t anymore, but God knows I did then.<\/p>\n

\"Carl<\/a>
Carl Hoffman in 1961, five months after the inauguration of President Kennedy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On November 22, 1963 I was 11 years old and in the sixth grade at the Sarah Greenwood Elementary School in the Dorchester section of Boston. I was in the Boston Public School System\u2019s pilot \u201crapid advanced class,\u201d because in those days I was thought to be \u201cgifted.\u201d To this day I have no idea why.<\/p>\n

As I mentioned, this was a pilot class, still experimental, so the school system spared no expense in providing us with the latest new textbooks; new learning materials; new teaching equipment; new desks and chairs that weren\u2019t bolted to the floor but which could actually be moved around the classroom; all kinds of fancy new educational whistles, bells, buzzers, and gongs; and most importantly, a new teacher, specially selected and trained to deal with\u2014I wince once more as I write this\u2014\u201cgifted\u201d children.<\/p>\n

Now while all of this was going on, we had a bright, young, handsome man in the White House, John F. Kennedy, our own dashing youthful senator from Massachusetts. The only president I had been aware of before this was Dwight Eisenhower\u2014instrumental in winning World War II before I was born\u2014but later a gray, bald, grandfatherly presence throughout my childhood, smiling blandly down at me from black-and-white portraits hung in every nursery school, kindergarten, and elementary school classroom in which I\u2019d been imprisoned up to 1961. After eight years of Ike, Kennedy was a major change.<\/p>\n

And after almost as many years being taught by elderly, unmarried, embittered, gray or blue-haired ladies with dowdy dresses, baggy stockings, ill-fitting dentures, and bifocal eyeglasses suspended from tarnished metal neck chains, my new teacher was a major change too. Mr. Joseph DeSario was young and male, two characteristics I had never seen or even imagined in a teacher before.<\/p>\n

But there was more to it than that. An 11 year-old mind has a lot to process. Everything is new; experience and information come flooding into the brain like a tsunami, often faster than a kid can clearly sort out. Well, sometimes wires get crossed, signals get mixed, and things get confused. Stated simply, my young new teacher, in front of me every day, and my young new president, on television every day, began for me to blend into one person.<\/p>\n

Both were young and handsome. Both were charismatic. Both were liberal Democrats, with what seemed to be identical outlooks and opinions. Both were married, had pretty young wives and cute little toddler children. Both had been in the military. Both were Catholic. And last but certainly not least, both were from Boston\u2014hometown boys whose immigrant ancestors had struggled on the same mean streets, albeit in different neighborhoods, that mine had at more or less the same time.<\/p>\n

So, whenever one appeared, I saw the other. Whenever one spoke, I heard the other. As far as my gut was concerned, President Kennedy was Mr. DeSario, and Mr. DeSario was President Kennedy.<\/p>\n

You can imagine the state of my 11 year-old mind on that chilly November day. Suddenly, without warning, part of my Kennedy\/DeSario tandem was gone. And as if that weren\u2019t enough, the actual Mr. DeSario happened to come down with the flu and was sick the next few days. His unheralded absence from the classroom left us in the hands of, yes, another blue-haired, embittered old lady with eyeglasses hanging from a metal neck chain. Mr. DeSario came back though, and we\u2014along with the rest of the country\u2014mourned our dead president and got on with our lives.<\/p>\n

I \u201cgraduated\u201d from the sixth grade and the advanced class in June 1964 and never saw Mr. DeSario again. I heard that he rose in the Boston Public School System, becoming principal of a high school, and then some sort of administrator. Early last summer, moved by a memory, I \u201cGoogled\u201d his name to find out where he was and what he was doing. I discovered that Mr. Joseph DeSario had died less than two weeks before, a little short of his 80th birthday.<\/p>\n

Let others continue to delve into the Kennedy assassination, probe the lingering mysteries, analyze the how\u2019s and why\u2019s, and pontificate about the effects of the assassination on American culture, politics, and the national psyche. As far as I\u2019m concerned, however, the case is now closed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 50 years ago , the world reacted with horror, shock, sadness, and grief. I also reacted with horror, shock, sadness, and grief, but there was something more than that going on in my mind. I took Kennedy\u2019s assassination personally. I don\u2019t anymore, but God knows I did then. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.midnighteast.com\/mag\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}